Tag Archives: America

Post navigation

Most of America (and, let’s be honest, statistically all of America’s men) love The Three Stooges and have for as long as “pointless violence without consequence” has been inexplicably hilarious for about 65% of the population. The vaudeville slapstick act was around from 1930 to 1975, though they’re best remembered for their now-syndicated short films featuring Larry, Moe and Curly from 1934 to 1947 (as well as the Larry, Moe and Shemp films that ran from 1947 to 1956 that we were always secretly disappointed to watch when they came on). Oh, there also was that Farrelly brothers movie version, which, um, well let’s just pretend that didn’t happen.

Many American childhoods have been spent watching three grown men beating on each other for no particular reason apart from “you said something dumb” or “you just asked me to hit your fist, which I will do, even though it will cause that fist to windmill around and bonk me on the head.” And while we have every right to celebrate them for all that they have done, including but not limited to filming the funniest use of eye gouging on film (followed in a distant, distant, distant second place by Game of Thrones), today we’re going to recognize that some of their films, largely through fault of their titles, and largely through the fact that these were being churned out with no regard for “a story that makes sense”, have aged somewhat awkwardly. Admittedly, no one remembers the names of any Three Stooges short, or even the plot of any individual one—our collective understanding of The Stooges begins and ends at “Moe is the boss, Curly makes the funny noises, and we guess Larry does stuff too sometimes.” That said, while thin in premise and generally serving as lazy ways to justify twenty minutes of the Stooges beating the shit out of each other, when you actually sit down and read the titles out loud, or simply stumble through a plot synopsis, a reader in 2015 might awkwardly tug at their collar and make a noise not much different than one Curly would make. So, we decided to look through the 190 shorts they managed to make in their career and cherry pick ones that we found to be especially uncomfortable-slash-hilarious. We’ve naturally listed them below for your reading pleasure.

We recently wrote an article that focused on the Medal of Honor—mainly, how the military’s highest honor, now given only to acts of almost impossible levels of valor, was sort of tossed around pretty willy-nilly in the years after the Civil War and before World War I. In that discussion, we briefly mentioned a U.S. Marine named Smedley Butler, who straight up tried to turn down his first Medal of Honor (yes, he was later awarded a second one) because he didn’t think he deserved it. We then came to realize that Smedley Butler, a badass with a kind of funny first name, isn’t really well known to the casual American—hell, we had only sort of stumbled across his career by accident.

And that’s some bullshit, because Smedley Butler died as the most highly decorated Marine in U.S. history, and served 34 years where he managed to collect medals, tropical diseases, and tactics for tricking the enemy like it was his job. Well, it sort of was his job, he was a marine, but you get the picture.

So allow us to spend three thousand words or so gushing about Smedley Butler, The Fighting Quaker.

America has always had an uncomfortable relationship with England, sort of like a second husband trying to be polite to his wife’s ex when he comes by to take his kid for the weekend. Like, we’re friendly enough, but deep down we kind of suspect they resent us for taking what they once had. We don’t say this to make any larger point about England and America, or even their alliance and history throughout the years, because nothing about this post is going to be diplomatic, smart, or even particularly well-informed. We’re here to make fun of British food.

We talk about food a lot here, and for good reason—America is a land of delicious and largely unhealthy delicacies, and frankly we think it’s a little rude for you to respond to our eager descriptions of insane fried foods with something like, “Dear God, according to your cholesterol levels you should be dead,” Doctor Fredricks. And we make fun of other countries a lot here, because we think America is the greatest and we kind of get defensive when people imply otherwise. Oh that’s great, Switzerland, your country is the happiest in the world, well fuck off we have nukes and guns we’re better than you FOOTBALLLLLL.

Ahem.

More to the point, considering how often we talk about American food in all its wondrous incarnations, it’s important to remind ourselves that light cannot exist without darkness. American food is the light. British food is…well there’s a reason we make fun of British food. This is the reason. These foods are the reasons.

“What’s that? This is the last one? The no more sandwich articles? FREEDOM! FREEDOM!”

~AFFotD’s Recently Over-Taxed Research Department

Several weeks ago we embarked on a dangerous mission—to write about every kind of American sandwich that we hadn’t previously covered in our four-part Submarine Sandwiches of America series from over a year ago. Some thought it couldn’t be done. Some resigned in outrage. The rest of us got drunk and decided, “Fuck it, we’ll probably miss a few sandwiches, but whatever” and got to writing. Since then we’ve talked about American classics, regional favorites, and way more open faced sandwiches than we expected to have to cover when we shruggingly decided to count random piles of shit on a single piece of bread as a sandwich. But we’ve finally come to an end to our journey, and we’re going to take things out the only way we know how.

By telling you about extremely strange sandwiches that have been created by America’s culinary know-how and disregard for convention. Well, not like last time when we talked about sweet ones. This here’s the savory division, y’all.

“What? You don’t think that’s a sweet-flavored sandwich? It’s got fruit in it, for God’s sake. Yes, cranberry counts as a fruit, I don’t give a shit if it’s tart!”

~Inter-Office Debate Among AFFotD Staffers

For the past few weeks, we’ve been shouting at you about various sandwiches that originated in America, using a list of arbitrary rules that, frankly, we’ve ignored more often than not in deciding what sandwiches warrant inclusion in our Sandwiches of America series. We’re now in the homestretch, where we talk about what we’ve deemed to be the oddest sandwiches in America. Admittedly, most entries in the open faced sandwich article, and some regional entries, definitely qualify as “odd” but we needed to limit this article’s length so we just kind of played fast and loose with our definitions of regional sandwiches and just general oddities. Deal with it, this is already published, and there’s nothing you can do to fix it.

For the rest of you who don’t particularly care about what sandwich shows up in which article, we’ll delve into our second to last article, where we tell you about strange sandwiches that we’ve decided to arbitrarily place in the “sweet” category.

“No, we’re not going to do EVERY Southern barbecue sandwich, we’re not insane.”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

So, we’ve been writing about sandwiches a lot lately, and we’re going to keep that train going. Okay, listen, this is the sixth article out of eight about how bread is a thing that can taste better when you put random shit in it, so at a certain point you just run out of ways to introduce the damn topic. “Hi, AFFotD here. As you’ve surely noticed, we’ve decided to take on the daunting task of telling you about every sandwich that’s unique enough to warrant discussion, outside of submarine style sandwiches that we covered in a four part series a year ago. After telling you about classic sandwiches, open face monstrosities, regional sandwiches of the East, and the unhealthy bread monsters birthed by the Midwest, we’re going to cover the rest of the nation, focusing on the South (and Miami, which doesn’t really count as the south), the Mountain Time Zone region, and the West Coast.”

Huh actually that was a decent way to set up this article. We’re not really sure why we put it in sarcastic quotation marks, come to think of it. Anyway, let’s talk sandwiches!

How do Midwesterners ever live past 40? Are their hearts made out of Adamantium?”

~Non-Midwesterners Reading About Popular Midwestern Sandwiches

Another day, another discussion of sandwiches coming long after you’ve tossed up your hands and screamed, “AFFotD, listen, I get it, there are a lot of sandwiches out there, you don’t have to tell us about every damn one!” Well too late reader, by the time you’ve read this, they’ve all been written, and nothing can stop us from posting them, so you’re going to take your two more weeks of sandwich articles and like it!

Anyway, we’re moving on to the Midwest now in our regional portion of sandwich celebration. As stated in the first article of the series, there will be no discussion of hot dogs, and we’ve also covered regional favorites such as the Italian Beef (though we put that picture up there because, God, how good does that look right now?). But don’t worry, there will be plenty of unhealthy food items, even from Chicago despite our decision not to include literally every food they’re famous for, for you to stuff down your gullet before sobbingly calling your dietitian to apologize for cheating. Westward, ho!

“No, seriously, if you want the best Pit Beef in the city, look no farther than outside a strip club. I’m not joking, actually.”

~Baltimore Residents

Welcome to part four of our eight-part American Sandwich Series, the only eight-part article series on the internet that’s express purpose is to make an entire staff of writers lose their minds to the point that they try to, and successfully, rob a bank using submarine sandwiches as weapons. Today we’re going to talk about somewhat lesser-known sandwiches that are specific to a very specific region. We’ll eventually cover the Midwest, and later the rest of America, but for now, the East Coast is here with a slew of sandwiches that range from “pretty normal” to “how did you know we were hungover, you’re a fucking angel for inventing this.” Let’s not dawdle.

“There can’t be that many distinct open faced sandwiches out there, right? Right? Why are you guys so mad, Research Department?”

~AFFotD Editor-in-Chief Johnny Roosevelt

We’ve started on a journey here at America Fun Fact of the Day. A journey to learn way more than we need to about sandwiches. So far, we’ve covered classic and traditional sandwiches ranging from the BLT to the PB&J to a bunch that actually have full names that can be spelled out. We’re on the third of eight articles on the subject, because someone once told us that you can never write too much about sandwiches, and we’re looking to expose him as the filthy fucking liar that he is. Which brings us to a specific genre of sandwich that often gets overlooked—the open faced sandwich. Really, this concept predates the actual sandwich, and some might take issue with a single slice of bread covered with additional food items being called a sandwich, to which we’d say you need to find more interesting things to have strong opinions of.

Open sandwiches appear everywhere, from the Scandinavian Smørbrød to the Russian buterbrod. Okay, we just copy and pasted those, apparently a Norwegian open sandwich just takes a piece of buttered bread and puts “whatever the fuck you want…meat? Smoked fish? Sure” on top, while buterbrod is just tomatoes and sprat on bread which is exactly as depressing as we’d expect from Russia’s contribution to this genre of food.

That said, there are numerous American-created open faced sandwiches. Most are served hot, and are the ideal American mix of delicious and actively trying to shorten our lifespan. We can get behind of those, so let’s talk about how America knows how to do open faced sandwiches the right way. Hah, Russia. Fucking sprat. You guys are the worst.

“Why are there so many sandwiches? Why are you making us do this, Johnny?”

~AFFotD’s Research Department

Earlier this week, we set some ground rules on what will be a record-breaking (what record? Fuck if we know, but there’s probably got to be some record out there that this breaks) eight-part article series to tell you about every sandwich we can think of that we haven’t already covered in our previous four-part section about regional submarine-style sandwiches. So far we’ve told you about five standard classic sandwiches, all of which hit that perfect American sweet spot of being delicious but also pretty unhealthy for you. We’ve been mainlining sandwiches ever since, trying to find inspiration through a bunch of cheese and/or bacon laden portable bread treats, and our doctor says if we don’t stop eating 10 sandwiches a day we’re going to die. We told him to shut up, we have articles to right, and we can’t think of a better hero’s death than to die from too many ingested sandwiches.

This article series is already starting to mess with our state of mind. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Now, more classic American sandwiches!

American Sandwich Series: Classic and Timeless American Sandwiches (Part 2)